Last week, J. D. Salinger’s estate reached an agreement with Fredrik Colting, which allows his novel “60 Years Later,” billed as a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye,” to be sold in international markets, but not in Canada or the United States. The book, which had a limited print run in England and Sweden in 2009, follows a seventy-six-year-old Mr. C as he escapes from a nursing home, and includes a character named Salinger who is keen on killing his famous creation. Other stipulations of the agreement, which ends two years of legal wrangling: Colting cannot dedicate the book to Salinger or make mention of the controversy in its marketing. He also agreed to ditch the book’s subtitle: “Coming Through the Rye.”
Of course, a book can’t really be banned anymore; in this case, a curious reader can order Colting’s book at www.amazon.com/uk (where things are mostly the same with a few charming exceptions: look, your shopping cart is a basket, the price is in pounds, and they “dispatch” your items rather than ship them!). Not that we’d recommend such action, based on what we’ve heard. Juliet Lapidos’s scathing and incredulous review at Slate, back when “60 Years Later” was first published in England, seems to be the first and last word on the matter. Or there’s the opinion of Judge Guido Calabresi, who during an early hearing on the estate’s petition to block distribution, dismissed Colting’s book as a “rather dismal piece of work.”
Colting, already unpopular among Salinger devotees, didn’t help his case last week with the interview he gave to the Daily Telegraph, in which he comes off as a smug rabble-rouser. “I’ve never had much respect for old things, just for the sake that they are old.” Strike one, but it gets worse. “If it was up to me I would replace Mona Lisa with something new.” Colting, who was born in Sweden but lives in New York, then went on to downplay the financial gain he expects from the book, which will be published in England, Sweden, Korea, and Greece, among other markets. “Do they even have money in Greece?” he asked. Salinger fans, art lovers, the Greeks—an ominous new set of enemies, no?
Many Web commenters fretted that all this coverage of Colting, who wrote the book under the pen name John David California, had simply rewarded his clever gambit, giving a bit of fan fiction the kind of free publicity that most writers only dream of receiving. True, and guilty here I suppose, but Web contrarians favor this colorless argument above all others, it seems, which makes one wonder why some people read the Internet at all. Concerning undue publicity, some responsibility falls to the Salinger estate, which through its vigorous efforts to protect Holden Caulfield, made this a bigger story than it might have been had Colting—who’s written books with the inauspicious titles of “The Pornstar Name Book: The Dirtiest Names On The Planet” and “The Macho Man’s Drinkbook: Because Nude Girls And Alcohol Go Great Together”—just been left to his own devices.
At the Guardian books blog, David Barnett used the Colting news to consider other unauthorized sequels or prequels to literary favorites, including the rush of Austen fan fiction, popular follow-ups to Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” and the Jean Rhys novel “Wide Sargasso Sea,” which imagines the life of the mad Mrs. Rochester from “Jane Eyre.” He ends the post by musing, “Maybe America should give a septuagenarian Holden Caulfield a chance.” It is unjust and rather oblivious, though, to lump Colting’s novel with “Wide Sargasso Sea,” which is not only a hard, glimmering gem of a novel, but was borne out of Jean Rhys’s own obsessions and precise knowledge of colonial life in the Caribbean. Fan fiction is surely not a new phenomenon, nor is it an uninteresting one, but it is different in kind and quality from a work like Rhys’s, or, to take a recent example, Cynthia Ozick’s remarkable new novel, “Foreign Bodies,” which reimagines the particulars of “The Ambassadors,” by Henry James. Not only do these books interpret texts in the public domain (“Catcher” will not lose its copyright for decades) but they do so with an admirable combination of respect and originality.
